It was the winter of 1940 and Vladislav Paluchowski had been hungry for weeks. A great, burning hunger ate up his insides. Lack of sustenance made him see strange things, like visions of flesh evaporating from his bones, rising into thin air, travelling up through shafts of sunlight. He knew the hunger brought the visions, but oddly enough, the images comforted him.

Outside, the real sun had long since surrendered its few hours of daylight, setting to a light grey cast: Siberia in winter. The wind raced across the frozen plain and moaned through the hut the family had been fortunate enough to find and inhabit, back when the old man was still strong, still the head of the family, before the hunger consumed him.

This morning, using several precious pats of dried cow dung, his wife made a fire and moved his straw bed closer, but it didn’t matter. The only warmth the old man felt any more came from the great, white-hot fire in his belly and the burning fire of his spirit.

When food and water were presented to him for the 13th time in as many days, the old man used the last of his energy to turn his head away. In his mind he grabbed his belt and cinched it tighter against a stomach that had long since ceased to rumble, only creaking occasionally now, like an old door, rusty on its hinges.

As the man’s strength ebbed, he felt his body sink deeper into the straw and envisioned the future his grandchildren would have, the future that his death would help ensure.

In tough times Vladislav had always turned inward, towards a greater strength – strength of faith, of wisdom, and of sacrifice. He had long before calculated how much food the five of them would need in order to survive the winter and he knew there wouldn’t be enough to sustain them all.

The time had come. To save the others – his wife, his daughter, his two grandsons – he would give up his already meagre portions.

The women – eyes long since drained of tears and exhausted from worry and work and lack of food themselves – no longer had the energy to object. The two young boys knew to respect the wishes of adults and so said nothing. But they watched. This old man wasn’t just a husband and father. He wasn’t just a grandfather. He was a force of nature. To starve was his dying wish, and he would not be denied.

To Vladislav, it was a simple question of fact: who would be most useful to the children? He had protected them as best he could, through banishment from their Polish homeland, through the long, dirty train ride that he thought would surely kill them, through moving their scant belongings into this small mud hut, and now his last remaining duty was to save the children. All of those other jobs had been taxing. All had been difficult. By contrast, his current job was simple. His job was to die.

When times get difficult, I often think of that old man out there on the steppe, making his final, fatal decision. That decision would touch and change every one of the people for whom he made the ultimate sacrifice.

I think of how the decision must have been difficult for him, and yet, also, in a strange way, so very clear. That man’s life and especially his death have been a great inspiration to me. Of the five people who lived in that mud hut, and the four who survived to leave the steppe, I am the only remaining member still alive.

You see, that man was my grandfather, and the child he died to save was me.

Perhaps because of my grandfather’s early sacrifice, witnessed at the impressionable age of five, I have always had trouble with the “me first” approach of our modern world. Helping the self is only the first part of the equation. It is not what ultimately sustains an individual. As Winston Churchill famously said, “We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.”

Thankfully, most of us will never be called upon to make as great a sacrifice as my grandfather made, but we can make smaller, daily sacrifices. We can learn to put others first in ways that create joy and enhance our lives. By sharing my Siberian experiences with you (and drawing on four decades as a practising psychotherapist), I hope to inspire you to nurture one of your greatest human attributes: the ability to understand and help others.

Ironically, one of the best ways to cultivate a desire to help others is to practise being purposefully grateful ourselves. Spending even a little time each day focusing on the things we have to be grateful for improves all aspects of our lives. And it’s so simple!

Actively cultivating gratefulness is not something most of us spend much time on.

We are more prone to focusing on our wants than on our haves. But this is not the only way to approach the world. We could easily wake up every morning thinking, “I have breath! I have life! I have shelter! I am here!” These are grand things to celebrate and should not be taken for granted. And yet we do.

The alarm sounds and we roll over and climb out of bed and begin to trudge through another day. But think, for a moment, about a day in which we wake and remember what we already have, the blessings that we have already been given, the things that we have already earned, the love that we have already found. Imagine a morning when we wake up and celebrate the now.

Remember this: if you are in a position to take things for granted, you are already blessed beyond your needs.

In today’s world where consumerism is king, we are bombarded by advertisements designed with the sole intent of creating a sense of dissatisfaction and longing – in short, to make us want the elusive more.

This general sense of dissatisfaction keeps us from seeing the abundant good that already surrounds us. It keeps us trapped in the illusion that we could be satisfied if we only had just a little bit more. But the trouble with satisfaction is that it is a constantly receding horizon. There is always the more, the bigger, and the better located just beyond our reach.

To practise gratitude, we must tune out these negative messages and look for the miracle in every day. We must tell ourselves stories that remind us that each day – each moment – is a precious gift. And that gift is what we have now, today, not something we need to look for in a far distant future.

There is a Sanskrit proverb that says, “Yesterday is but a dream, tomorrow is only a vision. But today, well lived, makes every yesterday a dream of happiness, and every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well, therefore, to this day, for it is life, the very life of life.”

If we can live in gratefulness today, the regrets of the past and the worries of the future disappear. By practising gratefulness, we move out of the self, we slow down and appreciate the present. And the more we practise gratefulness, the more grateful we become. Like wearing a pair of glasses whose lenses continually sharpen, we find more and more things to be grateful for. When you wear your gratitude glasses every day, they become a part of who you are – a habit of being.

And “Gratitude,” said Cicero, “is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.” It is through recognition of our own gratitude that we desire to reach out to others.